Their indicative forms are nearly the same. I have not looked very far, and make the speculation that the IE root was oral, and the common vowels a,e,i. They would have appeared as suffixes in IE I would think, as simple verb conversion from a stem, selected for vocal separation. But that necessity evaporates in the written because the verb for has a complete conjugation set at the suffix.
It seems a waste and a bunch of er and ir verbs got consolidated into ar somewhere during the Latin reform. I see only 60 regular ir verbs in the first 2,000 verbs. Some traces of the verb suffix came direct to English from IA, I think. like 'er' to make a noun out of a verb: run, runner.
The imperfect tense of ar verbs is another odd ball. iba forms seem like a special construction from the vernacular, as if it was in common use for 'do this thing since the past'. But the er and ir forms f that same thing seem more natural. I dunno on that one.
This business of etymology is fouled a bit because the actions of previous etymologists on the language are continual. The construction of formal written Latin grammar had a reverse impact. The intent of Latin was to let many of the tenses and person fall out of the stem when there was no such thing in the vernacular. It was a method for putting the local vernacular into a formal context for written translation. Hence my point, speaking formal Latin was more like quoting from the dictionary and doing an ongoing translation.
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